1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to voting systems and, more particularly, to a ballot tabulation device and method for tabulating paper ballots printed according to ballot style.
2. Description of Related Art
A variety of different types of voting equipment are used in the United States and throughout the world. In many jurisdictions, a voter receives a paper ballot on which is printed the various contests to be voted on. The voter votes by darkening or otherwise marking the appropriate mark spaces on the paper ballot. The marked paper ballot may then be dropped in a ballot box, whereby the ballot is transferred to a centralized location (e.g., a county courthouse) for tabulation by a high-speed tabulation device. Alternatively, many jurisdictions provide a smaller precinct-based ballot tabulation device at each polling place that allows a voter to directly insert her ballot into the device for tabulation. At the end of the election day, the vote totals from each of the precinct-based ballot tabulation devices are accumulated at the centralized location (e.g., the county courthouse), which is required to report the election results by voting precinct in accordance with state election laws.
In order to prepare for an election, a jurisdiction must print the paper ballots for each of the voting precincts within the jurisdiction, wherein each ballot includes a code that allows a precinct-based ballot tabulation device to determine the ballot style and precinct for the ballot. The jurisdiction must also program each of its precinct-based ballot tabulation devices with an election definition that allows the device to read the paper ballots applicable to that voting precinct (i.e., the election definition will vary from precinct to precinct). In some jurisdictions, the county will maintain a staff of employees who are trained to set-up the election information for each of the voting precincts within the jurisdiction. In other jurisdictions, there is little money to maintain such a staff and the county will instead rely on a vendor to supply the equipment and software necessary to accomplish this task.
The software package that is used to set-up the election information is commonly referred to as an election management system (EMS). The EMS performs the necessary steps of creating an election database that includes all of the district, contest, candidate and precinct information for the jurisdiction. This information is then used to create various ballot styles for each of the voting precincts within the jurisdiction. In other words, the EMS will create a different ballot style for each ballot face of each voting precinct within the jurisdiction.
Large jurisdictions have found the exercise of setting-up the election information to be very overwhelming. Managing thousands of different ballot styles across a multitude of voting precincts is a very arduous task. As a simplified example, if there is a single contest in an election for a jurisdiction with 1000 voting precincts, the jurisdiction must print different paper ballots for each of the 1000 voting precincts because of the differences between the codes on the ballots. Thus, although the paper ballots for each of the 1000 voting precincts may appear to be identical (i.e., they each include the same contest), the ballots are in fact different due to the different codes printed on the ballots.